staging

Hi all,

This may have been asked many times, I have already found quite a large number of posts out there, but found no answer to a simple question -> how can I easily deploy a new version of my site from dev / staging to production (without losing any single piece of user content) ?

I have seen Features, Deploy modules. Smart approaches like this one http://drupal.org/node/181128, well -- all kinds of things, I also know that deployment should be at the heart of D8 with the DOG initiative.

But yet, I am completely confused because as of today, I would like to be able to :

At DrupalCon Chicago there was a ton of energy around Drupal's staging and deployment problem. At his keynote, Dries identified this as one of the major initiatives for the Drupal 8 cycle, and following the keynote three Core Conversations were given on the topic by myself, David Strauss, and Howard Tyson. Those talks sparked conversations which continued through the week and generated a lot of really cool ideas. This post is intended to document the ideas that were discussed (at least the ones I heard) and to use those ideas to foster further discussion.

Dear Colleague,

One of the more complex problems in managing large Drupal projects is keeping development, staging and production environments in sync. As projects grow in complexity, including multiple developers and more features, it becomes ever more important to have a reliable, repeatable process for deploying new functionality to the production website.
Join Joshua Brauer, Acquia Client Advisor, for this complimentary webinar where he'll cover:

Using version control for your Drupal project
Migrating your code, files and database between sites

I would like to start a discussion about staging in Drupal 8...

By staging, I mean having a test site, where you can make changes and test them out, before pushing them to the production site and making them live for everybody.

At IDEIA we are currently working on a new (simple) staging solution.
I have evaluated many systems like : Features, Drush, StrongArm, Context, Patterns, DBScript, Migraine, Deploy, Node_Import, Feeds, Staging, etc...
The common problem encountered with theses modules are :
* they are compatible with few modules
* needs many manual operations and double checking
* handle only content, or config but not both of them

The only "global" solution is DBscript, but it's not a real module, not easy to configure (you must describe all foreign keys of your DB in a config file).

So we came to a new method, based on MySQL auto_increment_offset. These ID pattern allow to know from which DB came any content of any table in the DB.
For example, if we choose that ID terminated by 1 are "prod server", ID terminated by 2 are "test server", and ID terminated y 3 are "dev server".
So merging dev / test / prod is rather simple with some basic SQL UPDATE and DELETE for each table.

StagingVM will be down for maintenance for approximately 3-4 hours on Wednesday, March 31 while it is migrated to a new and faster cluster.

Dear all,

I thought it would be very helpful if I would bring it up here.

Our situation is that we are moving a large, multi-user knowledge management Portal into private beta. While we wish to have a "live" version of the site, with content creation, file upload , image upload and addition etc, we wish to maintain active development on several aspects of functionality.

Problem

To me a staging server is one where I try new modules, make settings changes, and otherwise screw around with the data structures. A production server holds the content, interacts with my users, etc.

My problem is when I need to create a staging server (by dumping the production server database) it immediately goes out of sync with the production server.

We're Drupal.org/NOVA members and a local (NOVA/DC) based hosting company.

Members are the group are invited to contact us if you need staging or production space on one of our dedicated servers in order to develop/test Drupal configurations.

We're always busy and not able to attend the meetings so we feel this is the best way to show our support!